suffer, the Prince
had asked the clergyman Walaeus with much anxiety whether the prisoner in
his message had said nothing of pardon.

Referring to the bitter past, Maurice asked Madame de Barneveld why she
not asked mercy for her son, having refused to do so for her husband.

Her answer was simple and noble:

"My husband was innocent of crime," she said; "my son is guilty."

The idea of pardon in this case was of course preposterous. Certainly if
Groeneveld had been forgiven, it would have been impossible to punish the
thirteen less guilty conspirators, already in the hands of justice, whom
he had hired to commit the assassination. The spectacle of the two
cowardly ringleaders going free while the meaner criminals were gibbeted
would have been a shock to the most rudimentary ideas of justice. It
would have been an equal outrage to pardon the younger Barnevelds for
intended murder, in which they had almost succeeded, when their great
father had already suffered for a constructive lese-majesty, the guilt of
which had been stoutly denied. Yet such is the dreary chain of cause and
effect that it is certain, had pardon been nobly offered to the
statesman, whose views of constitutional law varied from those of the
dominant party, the later crime would never have been committed. But
Francis Aerssens--considering his own and other partisans lives at stake
if the States' right party did not fall--had been able to bear down all
thoughts of mercy. He was successful, was called to the house of nobles,
and regained the embassy of Paris, while the house of Barneveld was
trodden into the dust of dishonour and ruin. Rarely has an offended
politician's revenge been more thorough than his. Never did the mocking
fiend betray his victims into the hands of the avenger more sardonically
than was done in this sombre tragedy.

The trials of the prisoners were rapidly conducted. Van Dyk, cruelly
tortured, confessed on the rack all the details of the conspiracy as they
were afterwards embodied in the sentences and have been stated in the
preceding narrative. Groeneveld was not tortured. His answers to the
interrogatories were so vague as to excite amazement at his general
ignorance of the foul transaction or at the feebleness of his memory,
while there was no attempt on his part to exculpate himself from the
damning charge. That it was he who had furnished funds for the proposed
murder and mutiny, knowing the purpose to which they were to be